In '80s, Tandy seemed dandy

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Dec 28, 2011 at 12:01 AMDec 28, 2011 at 11:35 AM

The literary history of the typewriter has its well- established milestones - from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with Life on the Mississippi to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac's On the Road, pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip "That's not writing; that's typing."

The literary history of the typewriter has its well- established milestones — from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with Life on the Mississippi to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip “That’s not writing; that’s typing.”

The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time.

Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to the best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s.

“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that would have littered Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine,” Kirschenbaum said, before asking a question he hopes he can answer: “Who were the early adopters, the first mainstream authors to trade in their typewriters for WordStar and WordPerfect?”

The lecture was drawn from his book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, which Harvard University is set to publish in 2013, or as soon as he can finish tapping it out on his iBuyPower 64-bit laptop.

Kirschenbaum has assembled a collection of word processors at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, where he is the associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

He has acquired about two dozen machines, including a Tandy, an Osborne, a Kaypro, an early TRS-80 laptop and an Apple IIe and IIc, along with the technological wisdom necessary to keep them working.

When his Macintosh Classics went on the fritz, Kirschenbaum had a graduate student pop the motherboards into the dishwasher.

“Putting it through the rinse cycle did the trick,” he said.

Uncovering a clean answer to the question “Who was the first novelist to use a word processor?” is a trickier business, although Kirschenbaum has promising leads. Through his agent, he heard that sci-fi writer Frank Herbert (Dune), who died in 1986, might have submitted work to his publisher in the late 1970s on 8-inch floppy disks.

“I’m following up on that,” he said, although he holds out little hope that the disks can be recovered.

Literary scholars have become increasingly interested in studying how the tools of writing both shape literature and are reflected in it — whether it’s the quill pen of the Romantic poets or the early round typewriter, known as a writing ball, that Friedrich Nietzsche used to compose some aphoristic fragments. (“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” Nietzsche typed.)

Some scholars have attributed the tangled style of Henry James’ late novels to his method of dictating them aloud to a “typewriter,” a term used at the time both to describe the machine itself and the person operating it.

If it is harder to think of word processing than typewriting in literary terms, that might be because we’re too enmeshed in the technology, said Darren Wershler, a research chairman at Concordia University in Montreal and the author of The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting.

“Writing about word processing when that’s how you write is like trying to write about your own hand,” he said.

Kirschenbaum — whose earlier book, Mechanisms, analyzed experimental electronic writing — said he was less interested in analyzing the stylistic effect of word processing than in recovering its early history, particularly its adoption by mainstream writers.

And in his lecture, sponsored by NYPL Labs, a unit of the library devoted to experimental technology, he ticked off the better-documented moments in that history.

Tom Clancy wrote his 1984 thriller The Hunt for Red October, often cited as one of the earliest word-processed best-sellers, on an Apple IIe, using WordStar software.

Jimmy Carter set off what might have been the first word-processing-related panic in 1981, when he accidently deleted several pages of his memoir by hitting the wrong keys on his $12,000 Lanier — a calamity noted in The New York Times.

Given the spottiness of the record, Kirschenbaum is hesitant to proclaim King the computer-age equivalent of Mark Twain, the first major U.S. writer to complete a work using the new technology.

But King’s 1983 short story The Word Processor, Kirschenbaum ventured, is “likely the earliest fictional treatment of word processing by a prominent English-language author.”

The story, published in Playboy (later retitled Word Processor of the Gods), certainly captured the unsettling ghostliness of the new technology, which allowed writers to correct themselves without leaving even the faintest trace.

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